Today's license changes and Unity

Okay, this is a question borne out of multiple ignorances, and my bad if this is NDA'd, but... I've just read Gruber's coverage of today's change in the iPhone OS SDK license; I was already intending to roll my own 3D engine for uni, but I'm just wondering what this means for people with an investment in Unity - can Unity use C/C++/Objective-C, not just C#? What will happen to those apps already released which use Unity? Will there be much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Copenhagen and rejoicing in Austin?

I don't know if discussing the license itself is under NDA or not. I assume not, but I could be wrong. Definitely cannot talk about anything relating to 4.0 though, unless it has clearly been publicly disclosed by Apple.

That's a good link. Thanks for sharing!

Yeah, I'll bet there will be at least a few people teed off about those particular changes. Still, how would they enforce that? Sounds like it's more directed at Flash than anything else.

@AnotherJake: As I understand it, iPhone/iPod touch apps created using Flash have several obvious identifying characteristics, such as munging all of the resources into the executable, rather than using multiple resource files spread throughout the bundle; I could be completely wrong however - Flash is not my favourite development tool and I haven't touched it in at least a couple of years...

@the_wandering_monster: Looks like the article has been updated:

John Gruber Wrote:I originally thought this would ban games written using Unity3D, but perhaps not â€” Unity3D produces a complete Xcode project and Objective-C source files, so itâ€™s more like a pre-processor than a cross-compiler. Hard to tell. If you forced me to bet, though, the fact that developers are writing C# code puts Unity3D on the wrong side of this rule.

Also:

John Gruber Wrote:It could hardly be more clear if they singled out Flash CS5 by name.

John Gruber, two paragraphs later Wrote:UPDATE: To be clear, I do not think that Apple is singling out Flash CS5.

As crystal

Gah, he's updated the article again in the time it took me to write this

I really don't think Apple has any beef with Unity. It seems like they darn well do have a beef with Flash though. Besides, the Unity guys are pretty sharp. I'm sure if they have issues, they'll just generate raw C++ code if they have to.

I really don't think Apple has any beef with Unity. It seems like they darn well do have a beef with Flash though. Besides, the Unity guys are pretty sharp. I'm sure if they have issues, they'll just generate raw C++ code if they have to.

Not going to happen. Unity uses Mono's ahead of time compiler to generate an executable instead interpreting/JIT compiling the code at runtime. There pretty much no way that it would be profitable for them to rewrite that to output C instead of machine code.

I think Apple is being obstinate and showing Adobe how much contempt they have for them. I suspect that the day is not far off when Adobe will simply pull the Mac version of their creative applications in return.

I don't care who Apple has a beef with. If they don't want Flash apps with crummy interfaces cluttering up their App store then they'd better start pulling anything that doesn't live up to their ridiculous standards. If they really aren't going to accept Flash apps, they'd better not be accepting Unity ones, Lua scripted ones or anything else.

Skorche Wrote:Not going to happen. Unity uses Mono's ahead of time compiler to generate an executable instead interpreting/JIT compiling the code at runtime. There pretty much no way that it would be profitable for them to rewrite that to output C instead of machine code.

I'd still wager they'll find a way to continue to support iPhone.

Skorche Wrote:I think Apple is being obstinate and showing Adobe how much contempt they have for them.

So true...

Skorche Wrote:I don't care who Apple has a beef with. If they don't want Flash apps with crummy interfaces cluttering up their App store then they'd better start....

You pessimist!

The guys running the show at Apple, and the folks in their legal department, are some of the most brilliant business and legal tacticians the world has ever seen. Their overall strategy, in my eyes, can be summed up with one word: Sosumi

The two recent examples we've discussed are good ones:
- Previously successful titles and titles from companies with enough known capital to present a potential challenge to Apple legal have been spotlighted, while small organizations have apparently been... inadvertently left out, with nothing to indicate that it wasn't perhaps on purpose.
- Developer agreement terms change unilaterally and... changed in ways to protect Apple from potential damage to their product, which would not likely be perceived to damage Apple in any way by anyone else, except Apple.

It's like they're *begging* for someone to take a swing at them. It's going to be interesting to see what the fallout will be from some of these recent, less happy, moves Apple has made.

Quote:But during a Q&A following the presentation, Jobs noted that developers had asked for Apple to develop its own social network. "There's no money to be made and no advantage to us to having a social gaming network, so everyone should just say 'great, less work for me'," he said.

"There's no money to be made and no advantage to us to having a social gaming network" Really? I mean, REALLY?

Dude, Steve, have you ever seen what Microsoft has done with Xbox 360? Where is the source of this incredible density your mind has toward gaming?

Wanna know why the gaming ecosystem is so screwed up on iPhone? There you have it folks. It's official: Steve Jobs doesn't know squat about the video game industry, and especially has absolutely ZERO connection with video gamers. NONE.

Sorry, I just gotta say one more thing: This is absolutely the DUMBEST thing I've ever heard Steve Jobs say. I mean, double dumb.

Total disconnect from reality: 'great, less work for me'

Steve. Buddy. The reason there is only ngmoco's Plus+ and OpenFeint is because no one but they have figured out any potentially viable way to earn money in a gaming ecosystem that you have completely screwed up. I don't just mean, "sort of", I mean *completely* screwed up. There is absolutely no way 99.9% of us game developers, be it indie or AAA will invest in your garbage ecosystem because we can't rely on anything going right in terms of economics. *Economics* Steve; it has nothing to do with doing "less work" you bozo.

Game Center sounds great! It should have been there from the beginning! No complaints about it at all so far from what I've read in the docs, etc. Game Center is not at all what I'm negative about right now -- I'm super negative about what Steve Jobs just said.

Over the last year and a half (or more) there have been many game developers who've expressed many frustrations about how Apple unfairly deals with them. This goes all the way from the bottom wannabe's (like me I suppose), all the way up to John Carmack:

Quote:JC: At the highest level of Apple, in their heart of hearts, theyâ€™re not proud of the iPhone being a game machine, they wish it was something else.

Now we have the words straight out of Steve Job's mouth which prove that statement as a truism. So true in fact that it looks even worse than Apple being "embarrassed" about games on the iPhone, but Jobs actually holding *contempt* toward the video game industry. (sorry I'm stealing your "contempt" terminology skorche, but it fits well)

Quote:Steve Jobs: There's no money to be made and no advantage to us to having a social gaming network, so everyone should just say 'great, less work for me'

I read this as, "Well, we couldn't come up with any reason to do it because games are worthless to the platform, but those lazy game developers bi7ched and moaned about it and we got sick of it, so we went ahead and did it for them, because they suck just like the ad systems suck, which we are totally going to do better too. So they'd better be happy now because we just saved them a bunch of work." Of course, I'm taking that as far out of context as I can to make the point, but really, I am having a hard time reading anything remotely friendly out of that statement. It's like nothing but smack talk directed at the video game industry.

I don't really see any other angle on it, especially considering the track record they've built up toward treating iPhone developers. Maybe I'm totally reading it wrong. Could somebody please put a positive spin on it for me?

Oh right, I get that quote now. It does come across as extremely contemptuous for games/gamers/game developers as obviously, even if there is no direct economic advantage for Apple, there is the advantage of having happy customers using your devices more.

Another thing I'm reading out of this "attitude" from Jobs (for lack of a better way to put it) is that they definitely will do everything they can to diminish games as being a major part of the platform. IOW, they don't want the iPad to take off as a hit as a gaming device (which I suppose is remotely possible because it really is a sweet gaming device as far as I can tell). This will be just like their attitude about the Mac: they won't want it perceived as a toy. Admittedly, this makes sense, and as game developers we want the platform to survive too, so I'm willing to play along with that. But for crying out loud, for all of Apple's brilliance, can't they find a better way to make the game ecosystem co-exist as an advantageous part of the device's appeal, rather than trying to bury and/or exploit it as the dirty whore in the corner?

Sheesh, this got me all worked up. I need to chill out and get back to my OpenFeint integration I was working on

FWIW, I don't think "Apple" feels like that about games, however Steve personally feels. There are commercials showing off games on the iPod Touch, they always have game developers on stage at iPhone events, etc.

I'd be quite happy to believe that Forstall "gets it" and Jobs doesn't, though

Now I get it Jake. And OSC is right - many Apple ads, on TV, print, and on huge billboards, prominently feature games.

The only positive spin I can put on his comment is that he's said things he has definitely done a 180 on before: "Nobody wants to watch video on a tiny little screen," being the most memorable.
If Apple truly didn't care and didn't want to encourage games, they simply would not have created such an SDK... though hopefully this will not turn into a Game Sprockets kerfuffle...